Some Made Men Struggle to Make Ends Meet

Richard Martino, a slender 47-year-old, favors Prada shoes and until recently drove a sleek black Mercedes-Benz. He has owned multimillion-dollar homes in Harrison and Southampton, N.Y. He spent much of the last decade running a telecommunications and Internet business to which his expertise helped bring in hundreds of millions of dollars. By one accounting, he made tens of millions for himself.

John Setaro, 57, did not finish high school, and has worked recently managing a fast-food restaurant in Seaford on Long Island. He generally wears neat but casual clothes, and lives in a modest, vinyl-sided, colonial-style house in Franklin Square. During a difficult period several years ago, according to his lawyer, he was making $2,400 a month.

But the two men nonetheless share an extraordinary bond, according to federal authorities: Both swore an oath to the Gambino crime family in a secret induction ceremony.

The striking disparities underscore a simple truth not always understood outside the ranks of the city’s five crime families: Some mobsters reap millions from rackets, and in some cases from legitimate enterprises, but many struggle to maintain a middle-class existence, and some are routinely broke. The impoverished gangster barely eking out a living is so commonplace that mobsters have a word for these poorer men of honor: brokesters.

The archetypal Hollywood image of a wiseguy with prodigious appetites, swaggering in a finely tailored suit with a diamond pinkie ring and a fat roll of 50s, conceals the more nuanced reality of mob economics, according to some prosecutors, federal agents, organized-crime experts and a few mobsters. Crime figures are not immune to ordinary financial burdens and woes, like struggling to make car payments and finding money for groceries.

No self-respecting mobster wants to be seen as a brokester — nor would he want his peers to think he struggles to keep up with his middle-class suburban neighbors. But the pressure is great as well to keep up appearances as a successful criminal. Mobsters have even been known to borrow money from loan sharks to throw it around on the street — and to pass it up as tribute to superiors — while at the same time scrimping in the privacy of their home.

“The hours are long, there is no benefits package, there is a high risk of prosecution, and very little job security,” said Gerald L. Shargel, a lawyer who has represented a number of mobsters, rich and poor, including several members of the Gotti clan.

By most accounts, mobsters fall into two types, earners and shooters, a division in some measure between the rich and those who wish they were. An earner is a man who can scheme and develop strategies, quickly deciphering the complexities of industry and commerce and labor. He is also someone who can sit down and blend in effortlessly with legitimate businessmen — often big businessmen — and union leaders.

Mr. Martino is an earner, according to federal prosecutors in Brooklyn. His work in an Internet pornography and a phone-cramming scheme was a boon to the Gambinos, netting hundreds of millions by billing people for “free tours” on pornographic Web sites and adding small charges to hundreds of thousands of telephone bills nationwide.

In September, he started serving a nine-year prison term after pleading guilty to wire fraud conspiracy and extortion in the scheme.

Pete Savino, a Genovese family associate, is also said to be an earner. He had a window installation business and was the mastermind of a scheme in the late 1980s and early ’90s to earn millions for four mob families by billing the New York City Housing Authority for a few extra dollars on every one of the millions of thermal-pane windows being installed in the authority’s buildings.

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Carmine Russo, holding money, and Elio Albanese, facing him, were photographed by investigators in 1993 as they sold fireworks on Mulberry Street. Investigators described them as brokesters: gangsters eking out a living.

A shooter is, well, a shooter. A leg-breaker. A killer. Someone who can readily and rapidly use violence as a business practice.

Mr. Setaro’s role in the mob division of labor seems clear. He is firmly ensconced in the mob’s middle class, according to court papers and interviews with law enforcement officials.

According to an F.B.I. source cited in a report from 2000, Mr. Setaro, in a conversation about how he hated working as a bookmaker, said that “if he is ever going to jail it is going to be for what he really is, ‘a shylock and a tough guy,’ ” referring to his work as a loan shark and a debt collector.

His prediction seems to have been accurate. He served 41 months for extortion.

James Tartaglione, a onetime Bonanno family captain who became a government witness in 2003 and has testified against fellow mobsters in several recent trials, explained the distinction to a jury in 2004.

“There’s people that go out there, just have a knack for earning money,” Mr. Tartaglione said at the trial of Bonanno boss Joseph Massino, an earner in his own right who was forced to give up more than $9 million in ill-gotten gains after he was convicted of murder and racketeering, and then agreed to cooperate with prosecutors. “They know how to put businesses together, and they are just good at what they do, as far as business. Then you got those tough guys that could go out and kill somebody and do whatever they have to do.”

It is not easy to gauge the real net worth or earning capacity of an organized-crime figure. Most are constantly scheming to hide their assets and income — and not only from taxing authorities and federal prosecutors eager to seize them.

They often deceive their own crime families about schemes that are “off the books” and unknown to their superiors.

In New York’s crime families, money generally flows up, from associates to soldiers to their captains to the administration and ultimately to the family’s boss. But few procedures are set in stone.

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The families do not have auditors. They rely on harsh punishment as a deterrent. In many mob murders, the victims were killed because they failed to pay tribute, or so the bosses thought, according to prosecutors and investigators.

Organized crime has many rules. Drug-dealing and prostitution are taboo; one cannot strike a fellow made man, or sleep with his wife or daughters; soldiers cannot borrow from a loan shark without approval; killing a boss is forbidden. But these rules are for people who revel in breaking rules.

Money flows into organized-crime families from almost as many sources as there are schemes in the heads of mobsters, from traditional staples like loan sharking, gambling, labor racketeering, cargo theft and bank robbery to skimming from industries that the mob once controlled and still influences in some cases: garbage hauling, construction, the piers, the garment district and the commercial linen business. Modern innovations include stock manipulation, Internet fraud, identity theft, health care schemes and everything from importing contaminated fish to counterfeiting designer blue jeans.

“There is no generally accepted percentage” that gets passed up, says Mark Feldman, who was in charge of the Organized Crime Section in the Brooklyn United States attorney’s office for a decade. “It’s a sliding scale driven by the particular greed and need and mentality of the particular individuals who control it.”

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Richard Martino, top, now in prison for wire fraud conspiracy and extortion, and John Setaro, who has served time for extortion.

In the early 1990s, when John Gotti was at the height of his power as the boss of the Gambino family, his 20 captains each handed up $3,000 for him at Christmastime, far less than the $10,000 demanded by his predecessor, Paul Castellano.

Joseph DeFede, who served as the acting boss of the Luchese family from 1994 until 1998, required that $1,000 from each soldier be passed into the family coffers each year. Much of that money went into a fund called the Well, to pay for lawyers’ fees, to use for loan sharking and to finance other schemes, according to Mr. DeFede, a gravel-voiced 72-year-old who became a government witness in 2001.

He testified at a 2003 trial that he made about $1.14 million during the four years he served as acting boss and that the organization brought in $6 million, in a stretch of hard times for the crime family that prosecutors say continues.

Since Vincent Basciano, a former acting boss of the Bonanno family, was convicted of racketeering earlier this year, federal prosecutors have sought to seize $11.4 million from him, citing profits they say he has made over two decades, including $5.2 million from gambling operations, $6 million from joker poker and $200,000 passed up to him as tribute in 2004 alone.

Mr. Basciano, who took over the family after Mr. Massino’s conviction in 2004, revealed his thinking about the division of lucre and labor in a conversation he had just before Christmas 2003. A captain at the time, he was speaking with Anthony Urso, then the family’s acting boss, and Mr. Tartaglione, who was secretly cooperating with prosecutors and wearing a wire.

“Like I told Tony at Christmastime, I’m not taxing any of the guys that are doing the work,” Mr. Basciano said, meaning the shooters. Let the earners put up the money, he said.

Mr. Tartaglione underscored the idea that it takes people with different skills to keep the family strong. “You need a lot of different things in the pot to make a good soup,” he said.

Inveterate brokesters are a different matter. Few would argue they are a necessary ingredient in any recipe. This colorful cast of crime figures sometimes leaves prosecutors and investigators, not to mention defense lawyers, shaking their heads.

Carmine Russo and Elio Albanese are two such men, according to interviews with law enforcement officials and defense lawyers. Identified by prosecutors as soldiers in the Genovese family, the two were part of a loose-knit but active bank robbery crew in the 1980s and 90s that pulled off several high-profile heists, according to federal authorities. Mr. Russo most recently pleaded guilty to plotting to rob the payroll of a New York Times printing plant in Queens and was sentenced to 57 months in federal prison.

Mr. Russo, known as Baby Carmine, lived with his mother at the foot of Mulberry Street until she died. He and Mr. Albanese, known as Chinatown, often seemed down on their luck, according to investigators who tracked them over the years. As a rule, they quickly burned through their money and often found themselves hustling and lounging along Mulberry Street.

They found ways to scrape by. In the weeks leading up to the Fourth of July, the two men could be seen from the windows in the rear of the criminal court building in Lower Manhattan, selling fireworks by the case to people in cars who pulled up on Mulberry below Canal Street.

Mr. Russo was released from federal prison in January. A person who knows him says he had been selling plastic bags at the Fulton Fish Market before it moved and was now hoping to open a small business in his Chinatown neighborhood.

His sentence included a $7,500 fine. He has been paying it off in monthly increments of $50 or $60.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A45 of the New York edition with the headline: Some Made Men Struggle to Make Ends Meet. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe